With only eight stages to Beijing and four thousand feet of elevation to shed, this stage isn’t quite the downhill collector’s item that you’d like it to be, shedding only two hundred feet of descent over the course of the stage, but the good news is that the descent delta just went up between now and stage 280.
The stage starts on a left hand bend heading gently downhill and east from the Xiaobai Haizi district of Ulanqab. The road stays east for a mile before taking a right hander that prepares a south easterly direction for the next fifteen miles. In essence, those fifteen miles are virtually all downhill and it’s not until the cycle route crosses the Gonggouhouhe expressway at ten miles that the road bottoms out at three thousand nine hundred feet, the lowest elevation of the stage.
Thereafter, the climbs start to kick in: the first is four miles long, which does include a short dip back down at thirteen miles, then after the top of that climb, the elevation continues to increase, but the slope is much less dramatic as the road enters a long left hand bend, still following the Dongsheng road, and indeed the railway line. The main highway has now become the G6 Jingzang Expressway, and it runs alongside the cycle route for the remainder of the stage.
Once the left hander finishes at fifteen miles, the route reassumes an easterly course, and although it’s lumpy flat to eighteen miles, the climbing starts all over again after that: indeed, the highest elevation of the stage at over four thousand two hundred feet isn’t reached until twenty one miles, after which there’s a mad descent of almost four hundred feet down to the finish on the approach to E’erdongzhen.
Distance: 24 miles / 38 kilometres
Ascent: 541 feet / 165 metres
RGT Magic Road: FRltNwa7LQUi
Max elevation: 4287 ft
Min elevation: 3906 ft
Total climbing: 542 ft
Total descent: -749 ft
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